Remember that broadband certainly wasn??™t what it is today. Tack bandwidth concerns onto
security concerns and entire companies disabling JavaScript outright, and you have a situation
in which JavaScript seemed like a toy language. You had something that seemed the Web
could do without.
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C H A P T E R 1
With IE a clear victor of the ???browser wars,??? Netscape languished. You might have concluded
that developers would develop only for IE after it garnered more than 90 percent of the
market. And many did (including me). But that ubiquity still didn??™t exist. Corporate environments
and home users continued to use Netscape as a default browser. Clients I worked with
still demanded Netscape 4 compliance, even heading into the new millennium. Building any
sort of cross-browser functionality was still a hassle except for processes such as form
validation.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which included partners from many of the
browser developers, continued to update and finalize much of the technologies in use today,
including HTML/XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and the document object model
(DOM).
With standards in place and maturing, browser developers had a solid baseline from
which to develop against. Things began to change. When Mozilla Firefox finally came out in
2004, there was finally a browser that worked across multiple operating systems and had fantastic
support for the latest HTML/XHTML, CSS, and DOM standards.
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